The Pawnbroker (8 page)

"I gave you fifty dollars last week. Why bread and milk?" Sol said angrily as he reclined on the sofa, which was as shapeless as the chair she sat on.

"Why, why! I had to have the doctor twice for him, the old man—
house calls.
Ten dollars each time."

"So, thirty dollars in five days. Not a fortune, but you should have more than bread and milk from it."

"Oh, I go crazy, too, you know. So I took in one little movie, so I bought one little house dress I shouldn't walk around with holes showing. It's a crime?" She glared at him savagely, as though to make up for her unaltered position of repose.

Sol waved his hand to dismiss the subject. "I'll leave you a few dollars before I go. Remind me." He turned his head toward the doorway that led to the two bedrooms. "How is he, the old man?"

"Eh, he fives. How can he be?"

Sol nodded and slid lower on the couch, so that he was lying almost horizontal. He exhaled slowly through his teeth and crossed his arms over his eyes. The ugly grotto of the room permeated him with all its stale, musty odors; and yet oddly, as always, his body went limp with relaxation. He heard Tessie sighing quietly across the small room, seemed to see, even through his covering arms, the crowding, unattractive mementoes she had reclaimed or imitated from her past life: a brass samovar, a twin-framed ornate picture of herself and her late husband, Herman Rubin, a brown depressing tapestry which depicted a waterway in Venice, a fluted china plate teeming with iridescent-green tulips, a picture of her father and her mother in the frozen poses of a half-century ago, an oval-framed portrait of a fat-faced child with slightly crossed eyes—her late son, Morris. The sink in the kitchen leaked steadily, not drops, but in a persistent trickle. From above came the sound of many footsteps, the heavy ones of men and women, the dance of the young. The old man groaned in the bedroom, called out a complicated Yiddish-Polish curse, and then subsided into high, womanish moans, which gradually diminished to little respiratory grunts. There was a smell of sour milk and cauliflower and an all-pervading odor of sweat, as though the building were a huge living creature. Gradually, Sol's body lightened, his breathing came more deeply and regularly. He lay there listening to the sound of his body drifting toward sleep, observing the numbing peace of his limbs, until he slept, deeply and peacefully.

When he woke he couldn't remember where he was for a moment. The room was dark except for the thick beam of light cast on the floor from the kitchen. He lay without moving, listening to the clattering of pots and pans, savoring the nerveless ease of his body.

"Vat is to eat?
Ich bin kronk.
I need strength,
kayach,
" the old querulous voice said. "I eat bread and milk and you ... vat do you hide and eat ven I sleep? Hah, vat—lox and herring, some juicy smoked fish?
Ich bin kronk, dine aine tata.
You would starve me. Ah, it is all up vit me," he whined.

"Shh, you will wake him, let him sleep. He is so tired, that man, he needs to sleep. I took some money from his pocket and bought some nice fresh eggs, some cream cheese. You like cream cheese, Pa," she said.

"I dream about smoked butterfish. Why can't we have smoked butterfish?" the old man complained.

"I'll fry the eggs hard, the way you like them," the woman's voice said. "Just don't talk so loud, please. He gets his best sleep here."

Sol lay without moving. The smell of the frying eggs came to him, the sounds of the other people in the building. All around him fife of various sorts, stone hollowed out and filled with the insect life of humans, the whole earth honeycombed with them. In another pocket of stone or brick or wood, Jesus Ortiz, Morton, George Smith, Murillio, billions. Insects ruining the sweet, silent proportions of the earth. Undermining, soiling, hurting. Where was the gigantic foot to crush them all? Where was blessed silence? Footsteps, pots clanking, voices of strangers, of the old man, the woman in the kitchen. He drifted off to explore a last little void of dreamless sleep.

"Sol, Sol, wake up. I have supper. Come, before it gets cold."

He peered up at her gaunt, bleak face. She nodded to tell him he was awake; she had much experience with the violated borders between reality and dreams, knew enough to take the time to reassure a sleeper. "Eggs and rolls, coffee. Yes, yes, it is only Tessie ... come."

Slowly he unrolled himself, sat up, then stood. She touched his arm, and he followed her. In the kitchen, the old man shrugged at him.

"Hello Mendel," he said.

"Sure, sure," the old man said bitterly. "What do they care? Yeh, don't esk qvestion, it's a Jew—gas him, burn him, stick him through vit hot needles."

"Eat, Pa, while it's hot," Tessie said, looking at Sol over her father's head.

They sat down together at the porcelain-topped table. Sol reached for a roll, and Tessie poured coffee while the old man muttered the prayer over the food sullenly, his face like an arid relief map of some forgotten valley. He was seventy-five but he looked a hundred. He had many dents in his bald head, his nose was crushed; but he had been of durable stock, so he was still alive.

"Her husband died in Belsen," the old man said suddenly, pointing a crooked accusing finger at his daughter. "And vat they did to her, yes, yes. And she sits there like a
lady. Oy vay, ich bin zayer kronk.
" He began to weep and dab at his eyes.

"I know, Mendel. Stop that now. Let us eat in peace, for Christ's sake," Sol said. Mournfully, he himself began to eat, as though to set an example. Tessie shrugged and ate, too, with her eyes on the food. She had a tattoo similar to Sol's on the dead-white skin of her arm. The sink dripped, the neighbors pounded on the ceiling, shouted occasionally in Spanish or Yiddish. Someone screamed in the street, and a police siren sounded, going away from all of it. Here, Rubin, here is your lovely widow, your stately father-in-law; I watch over them for you, keep them in a manner befitting their station. Let your bones lie easy in the earth—you are missing nothing, nothing at all.

Finally they were through. Tessie herded the old man into his room and closed the door. She came back into the kitchen and cleared the dishes away. Sol went into the living room and sat down. He closed his eyes and waited. Soon he heard her come into the room and sit down beside him. He opened his eyes; the room was still lit only by the light from the kitchen. She looked at him with glittering, dismal eyes.

"So what do we have in this life?" she said.

"We have, we have. We live."

"I feel like screaming all day long. I feel like screaming myself to death," she said.

"But you don't and I don't and the old man doesn't. We live and fight off the animals."

"They're better off, the dead ones."

"I won't argue. I don't want to talk about it. It is ridiculous to talk about it. I don't feel so good the past week or two anyhow. Don't talk about nonsense."

"So I won't talk," she said.

They sat there in silence for about ten minutes, in the pose of two peaceful people seated on a cool veranda watching the country scene.

After a while she said, "Do you want to?"

"All right," he said.

She took off her dress in the dimness. He lay back on the couch. Finally she pushed her heavy, hanging breasts in his face and lay against him. "You're not too tired?"

He shook his head against her warm body, which smelled old. They turned into each other with little moans. And then they made love on the lumpy couch with the sounds of the old man's groaning madness in the other room, and there was very little of passion between them and nothing of real love or tenderness, but, rather, that immensely stronger force of desperation and mutual anguish.

When it was over, they said nothing to each other. After a few minutes, Sol got up and straightened his clothing. Then he took some money from his pocket and wedged it under the samovar. With his hand on the door, he spoke without turning.

"Maybe Monday, Tuesday I will come again," he said.

"What shall I do about that torturer Goberman?" she asked dully, expecting no illusion of grace from him. Her collapsed body lay wraithlike in the darkened room.

"All right, I will come Monday night. Tell Goberman to come then, that you will settle with him then. I will be here, I will deal with him."

She sighed for answer.

He closed the door on her and her father; it was like administering a drug to himself, that closing of the door, an opiate locking off a corridor of his mind. He went out through the tiled hallway, with its smell of garbage and its resemblance to some ancient, abandoned hospital, until he was on the street, which was erratically lit and smoky with the increasing heat.

Then he walked like a man in a dream toward the subway, sagging with tiredness again at the prospect of the distance between him and his bed.

Mabel Wheatly hung on Jesus Ortiz's arm like a bride; he suffered her possessive embrace because it made him feel manly to walk through the crowd that way. The counterfeit exoticism of the dance hall, garish and frenetic, fell over them as they walked. There was a huge babble of voices, the feathery rustling of dresses. The savage farce of light that came from a rotating prism on the ceiling bathed Jesus and the girl in green, in red, in yellow, in blue. The orchestra crashed rhythmically, with a minimum of tune. Dark faces, white teeth, and fluttering clothes made a shifting corridor for them as they shoved their way along one side of the huge room toward an empty table.

Ortiz plunked the two bottles of beer on the table, and they sat. He scanned the teeming hall with cool, faintly bared eyes, liking the picture of them; him sitting like a man who had been around, Mabel half leaning over the table, holding his hand, her eyes fixed on him. Her expression was a naïve attempt at sultriness; it was her stock in trade, but also the only way she knew how to show emotion. She had on a dress of metallic green, cut low to reveal the tops of her full, brown breasts. Her face was softly curved, wide-nostriled, long-eyed; she offered the best of herself to her companion, but he sat in a sullen reverie, casting his eyes around for something he had no hope of finding there.

"You want to dance, hon?" she asked timidly, brushing her fingers against the back of his hand.

"Let's just sit ... talk a while. I'm tired. That Jew had me working my
cojones
off all afternoon. Let's just talk," he said idly, his eyes everywhere but on her.

"What you want to talk about, honey?" she asked. She clung to him hungrily with her eyes, yearning toward some odd, bright cleanliness she imagined in him. Half consciously she saw a hope of escape in him. Not that she actually thought her prostitution was a bad way to earn a living. Only she became drugged with hopelessness at times, experienced boredom of such an intense degree, as she indulged the queer fears and lusts of her paying customers, that she had even considered suicide, and passed it by only because of some inexplicable curiosity about what the next day would bring. This boy was so cool, so sweet to look at. He seemed to know something, have some marvelous answer in him. "You got somethin' special in mind, sweety? What?"

"Talk?" He turned to her as though she had brought up the suggestion. "Well now, what could you and me have to talk? Business, you want to talk about what kind of business I should go into?" he said sarcastically. "You an expert or something? All right then, tell me. Should I go into the clothing business like my uncle in Detroit? Or tombstones, or baby carriages, or groceries, or ... or a pawnshop?"

"Good money in that pawnshop business," she said, pretending he hadn't been teasing her with the question. "The Jew teachin' you that business, ain't he?"

"Yeah, he teachin'." Suddenly his eyes went hard with the gleam of desire. "Oh, if I had the f—g dough, the loot..."

"You serious about that business kick, ain't you, hon?" she asked, wondering how to connect herself with his desire.

"I'm serious."

She looked at him cautiously for a moment. "Could I maybe go in with you?" she blurted out.

He looked at her with scornful amusement.

"You sayin' how you need the money so bad. Well, what if I chip in with some? How would that be?"

He smiled and ran his fingers up her arm. He was flattered at being offered money by a whore. How many men got offers like that? Wasn't that evidence that he was a man among men?

"It might be; you never know, Mabel. I like you good enough, you a sweet baby to be with. Of course, I figure my plans for me alone, but you never know. You show me the money, and we could see."

"You see. I get me some money together, gonna start squeezin' for it. I don't want to do what I'm doin' forever either, you know. I get some
gifts,
extra, you know. I already got a load of stuff to hock. You see, honey, I gonna surprise you."

"Yeah, you do that, fine, fine," he said, searching the crowded hall. All around were the myriad, elusive colors, the thumping music entwined with the hundreds of voices and the whispering slide of the many dancers on the floor. The colors played over his delicate head like the reflection of all his fleeting ideas, of his strange, desperate daydreams. He was big and had hands of great brawny power, a face that was tough and brutal and inspired fear and awe; and everyone, himself included, knew his name, for it was graven on the wall of some huge and imposing edifice—Jesus Ortiz.

Tangee and Buck White sat down at the next table. Tangee was with some strange woman, not his wife, a black, fulsome woman with purple lipstick. Buck White watched his wife shyly. She was a light-skinned girl of frail and tinselly beauty who demonstrated by her bored sullen expression that she had been bought by her slow-witted husband but that her price was going up, right before his despairing eyes.

"Hey man," Tangee called over. "How the pawnbrokin' business?"

"Makin' out," Jesus answered blandly.

"Aw listen to him,
makin' out!
That place
coin
money."

Jesus shrugged. "Ain't mine."